In the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler profiles Auburn Professor of Philosophy Kelly Jolley.

He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”

Slate has Sara Mosle’s review of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes.

[The book] is an inspirational story about one man’s efforts to boost educational achievement in New York City’s Harlem. The book is also a sobering tale of how such good intentions, alone, are often not enough. Put the two together, and you have everything you need to know not only about inner-city education, poverty, and charter schools but about the realism that is essential to ambitious reform.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich examines the erosion of literacy in America.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Do you despise choppy modern forms of communication such as text messaging? There is nothing wrong with the model, Luddite. The problem is your vocabulary.

At the Los Angeles Times, Lee Drutman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

Writing for Slate, Ray Fisman explains why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Clark Davis covers BB&T CEO John Allison’s attempts to buy Ayn Rand a place on campus.

The New York Times is running a story on university fund-raising.

On a hilltop patio with a stunning view of the J. Paul Getty Museum, as guests sipped bubbling guava-pineapple martinis, John Sexton, the president of New York University, was far from home, chatting up the crowd.

The 70 guests assembled in Los Angeles for this event on a beautiful spring evening, had already given $5,000 or more to N.Y.U. The parking area at the top of the private street that led to the mansion, owned by Nancy Moonves, former wife of the television mogul Leslie Moonves (and mother of two N.Y.U. students), was filled with Lexus and Mercedes sedans as well as a sleek Ferrari.

“I thank you,” Dr. Sexton said, “and I ask you to do 10 times as much as you are doing.”

The Washington Post has an article on how the hideous shorthand that makes instant messaging so unbearable is seeping into students’ papers.

The American textbook publisher will be bought by Ireland’s Riverdeep Holdings, an educational software firm that sells such well-known series as Reader Rabbit and Oregon Trail.

An AP article (by way of CNN) again airs Bill Gates’s views on education.

[Gates] spoke of some creative school programs–particularly charter schools run by private companies–that should be a model for innovation in the nation’s schools.

Yes, just as in the past his primary objection to American education is that it is more than a corporate training ground.

Even after years of teaching and tutoring, it still amazes me that college students so often need basic writing advice. Students do not want to write and do not understand why they need to be able to write well.

The “Thinking” section of Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing begins by addressing student attitudes toward writing:

Why do students write? Easy, most students would say: Because we have to. Honest, perhaps, but discouraging. It makes writing seem pretty trivial. How about another go? Here’s a likely second answer: To show what we know. Hmm, I’m not sure I like that much better. Isn’t there something more positive we can say about writing?

Texas grossly inflates its high school graduation numbers, masking critical dropout figures, according to studies to be presented Friday at a Rice University conference.

Academicians from institutions including Rice, Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, as well as other experts in the field, say their goal is to bring clarity to the problem, explain the implications for the state and nation and lay the groundwork for progress.

Read the rest of the article at The Dallas Morning News.

An interesting article at The New York Times exposes graft in the Department of Education.

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, reviews The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates at The Washington Post.

The study seems to be full of holes to me, such as the following attempt to divorce reading skills from writing skills:

Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

The University of Chicago has completed its archive of Saul Bellow’s professional papers.

In “The Lowering of Higher Education,” Christopher Phelps writes:

I was wondering what to make of this dispiriting but solitary data set when I read about the Education Department study released late last week that shows that the average literacy of college-educated Americans declined precipitously between 1992 and 2003. Just 25 percent of college graduates scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” in literacy.

Read the rest of the article at Inside Higher Ed.

I’m lazing around recovering from the paper-grading blitz, and so for today’s post, I give you: Quotes From The Land Of Semi-Literate College Students!

Some are poorly-written, some have odd typos, a few are simply bizarre…and they’re all directly from real student papers.

Read the rest of the article at Moggy Mania.